Top Unexpected Quotes

Favorite Unexpected Quotes

1. "Since Betty was on the pill or took precautions of her own which Graham did not choose to enquire into, the marital bed was untrammelled by tedious prophylaxis so that what Graham had been expecting to find an onerous and even distasteful duty unexpectedly partook of a freedom and absence of restraint that he found exhilerating."Author: Alan Bennett

2. "An oceanic expanse of pre-dawn gray white below obscures a checkered grid of Saskatchewan, a snow plain nicked by the dark, unruly lines of woody swales. One might imagine that little is to be seen from a plane at night, but above the clouds the Milky Way is a dense, blazing arch. A full moon often lights the planet freshly, and patterns of human culture, artificially lit, are striking in ways not visible in daylight. One evening I saw the distinctive glows of cities around Delhi diffused like spiral galaxies in a continuous deck of stratus clouds far below us. In Algeria and on the Asian steppes, wind-whipped pennants of gas flared. The jungle burned in incandescent spots in Malaysia and Brazil. One clear evening at 20,000 feet over Manhattan, I could see, it seemed, every streetlight halfway to the end of Long Island. A summer lightning bolt unexpectedly revealed thousands of bright dots on the ink-black veld of the northern Transvaal: sheep."Author: Barry Lopez

3. "I love it when characters surprise you, just like real people. When I write a scene I just try to make the characters behave in a way that feels natural to them. Sometimes that means they make a left turn and do something unexpected. Those are always the best scenes in my opinion."Author: Brad Falchuk

4. "Remember William Blake who said: "Improvement makes straight, straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius."The truth is, life itself, is always startling, strange, unexpected. But when the truth is told about it everybody knows at once that it is life itself and not made up.But in ordinary fiction, movies, etc, everything is smoothed out to seem plausible--villains made bad, heroes splendid, heroines glamorous, and so on, so that no one believes a word"Author: Brenda Ueland

5. "He slid over to me and grabbed me closer to him. My smile fell from my face with the unexpectedness of it. His hands cupped my face, his lips hovering above mine."You seriously want to know, Tess?"He closed the space and claimed my mouth with an urgent, hot, delving kiss.He smiled. "You are sexy, in your own goofball way, you're sweet and beautiful and smart and funny and, although you kiss to the point where I feel like I want to go back for seconds, you're my best friend, and that's why I don't want to tap that."Author: C.J. Duggan

6. "But sometimes, in tight corners, when your back is against the wall and the world is against you, you have to fight back in unexpected ways."Author: Caroline B. Cooney

7. "It's not good, is it?"Galen's reply was convincingly nonchalant. "I've seen worse.""Yes-on a dead man."Galen averted his eyes for a moment before giving a reply. "Don't talk like that.""Sorry.""Don't apologize, either."Steldor gave a wry laugh. "Would you mind telling me what I am allowed to do?"Galen couldn't suppress a smirk, thought it was laced with sadness, as he recognized the beginning of one of their classic bickering contests."Sure-you can shut your trap."Steldor was smirking, too, then he grimaced, arching his back as unexpected pain shot through him, and new drops of sweat materialized on his forehead."Steldor-" Galen started, humor lost, reaching toward him with undetermined intent. Steldor smacked his hand away with as much vigor as he could muster."No," he growled, gritting his teeth. "Ignore it.I don't want to think about it."Galen nodded, thought he looked uneasy. "Just tell me what to do," he said in a small voice. "Tell me to shut my trap again."Author: Cayla Kluver

8. "I was grateful to Ben the way you are grateful to someone who is unexpectedly kind."Author: Cheryl Drake Harris

10. "It's fun playing two roles. The roles provide a wonderful range of emotions. Stuart is childlike and sensitive. Adam is ruthless, outrageous. He's flamboyant. He does the unexpected."Author: David Canary

11. "Books Fall OpenBooks fall open,you fall in,delighted where,you've never been.Hear voices not once heard before,Reach world through world,through door on door.Find unexpected keys to things,locked up beyond imaginings….True books will venture,Dare you out,Whisper secrets,Maybe shout,across the gloom,to you in needWho hanker fora book to read."Author: David T.W. McCord

12. "[He] made me feel…large, maybe. In a way I hadn't before. But he didn't know that. For all he knew, I was always that large. It felt good. Fun. Unexpectedly large is sudden, magic levitation—you're high, an impervious Balloon of Joy."Author: Deb Caletti

13. "I'll leave it to you, Sassenach," he said dryly, "to imagine what it feels like to arrive unexpectedly in the midst of a brothel, in possession of a verra large sausage."Author: Diana Gabaldon

14. "You are very unexpected, do you know that?""Is that your way of calling me stupid?" she asked wryly."If the glove fits," he said."Author: Diana Pharaoh Francis

15. "Then welcome, you poor things! I'm so gald you're here! I never get to talk to anyone except when I'm working, and then I'm supposed to say things like, 'Woe is me' and 'Beware' and 'Uncle Rupert is going to die.' And then they look at me like I have two heads, which I don't because I'm not a troll , and they always say, 'Oh, no, the banshee is here!' Do you know how that makes me feel? Every time I show up, people run screaming and warn everybody else that I'm around. Believe me, I've thought about staying home and sleeping late, but I can't because I care about people. Without me to warn them, people would die unexpectedly, and then where would their relatives be? When I tell them, they have time to make arrangments, say good-bye...you know-important things. I'm actually a very nice person; it's just that no one gives me a chance to prove it."Author: E.D. Baker

16. "I was walking late one night along a tree-lined path; a chestnut fell at my feet. The noise it made as it burst, the resonance it provoked in me, and an upheaval out of all proportion to this insignificant event thrust me into miracle, into the rapture of the definitive, as if there were no more questions—only answers. I was drunk on a thousand unexpected discoveries, none of which I could make use of. … This is how I nearly reached the Supreme. But instead I went on with my walk."Author: Emil Cioran

17. "[The purpose of flight research] is to separate the real from the imagined problems and to make known the overlooked and the unexpected."Author: Hugh L. Dryden

18. "Perhaps it's one of those cases of a microcosm giving you the whole world. Like a spode dinner plate. Or a single cell. Or, as daisy says, like a Jane Austen novel. When player and listener together know the route so well, the pleasure is in the deviation, the unexpected turn against the grain. To see a world in a grain of sand. So it is, Perowne tries to convince himself, with clipping an aneurysm: absorbing variation on an unchanging theme."Author: Ian McEwan

19. "Once, at one of the very rare and savory moments when my own teammates grudgingly allowed me to take the ball around one of the ends, Seymour, playing for the opposite side, disconcerted me by looking overjoyed to see me as I charged in his direction, as though it were an unexpected, an enormously providential chance encounter. I stopped almost dead short, and someone, of course, brought me down, in neighborhood talk, like a ton of bricks."Author: J.D. Salinger

20. "Well, you can go on looking forward," said Gandalf. "There may be many unexpected feasts ahead of you."Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

21. "The world is one unending chess match, my dear, and I am the one playing it how I please. I poke and prod to move my pieces to places I find desirable. And the defiant ones who resist me I simply remove from the board." He pulled up his right sleeve, showing Laura a sheathed dagger strapped to his arm. "But you, Laura, are not of this chess match at all. You walked unexpectedly onto my board, scattering my pieces out of the way, the ones that I had worked on so tirelessly to arrange to perfection."Author: J.S. Bailey

22. "That's the past for you. Not only does it come back at the most unexpected, and inconvenient, times but it's set in stone."Author: Jeffery Deaver

23. "Aiden grabbed my arm, pulling me right against his chest. The unexpected contact fried my brain. "If I was like every other pure-blood, I would have had you by now, without even thinking about the consequences for you. Every day is a struggle not to be like them."Author: Jennifer L. Armentrout

24. "Be gracious in your giving for as long as you're living. The blessings will come back on an unexpected day, and present themselves in an unexpected way."Author: Joan Marques

25. "Work diligently. Work hard. Focus. Perform as if you are at the Olympics. One day, unexpectedly, it will start paying off."Author: Joan Marques

26. "I used to be terrified of death. My grandfather was terminal in the hospital across from my high school, yet I never visited him. That fact still haunts me to this day. Years later, my arms were around my grandmother as she struggled with her last breaths. I told her we were with her and everything was going to be okay. She died as I held her tightly and I felt her body lose life. It was the most peaceful moment I ever experienced, and I felt joy for her. It was an emotional, intellectual, and spiritual moment for me. I wasn't afraid anymore.... One day years later I received the phone call every parent dreads. My daughter was in a serious automobile accident. As I raced to her I prepared myself for the news she had died. Once again, I felt an unexpected and profound emotion. She lived, but in the face of that horrifying time there was a strange overall calm. I realized, no matter what, everything was going to be okay. I remembered I wasn't afraid anymore."Author: John K. Brown

27. "Nick laughed and gave in to the urge to brush Perry's fair hair out of his eyes -- his fingertips sensitive to the silky texture of eyebrows and hair, warm skin, eyelashes.Perry's lashes fluttered down, concealing his eyes."Hey," Nick said huskily.Perry gave him an uncertain look.It was a mistake, of course. A huge mistake. But suddenly, urgently Nick wanted to taste Perry's mouth, so he bent his head. Perry's eyes widened, then their faces bumped, and his mouth found Perry's.It was a gentle kiss, because Nick was thinking what a stupid thing this was to do, and that Perry, being inexperienced, would probably expect songbirds and firecrackers.Perry tasted like hot chocolate and something warm and young and male. It was unexpectedly erotic. He responded sweetly, opening right up, and Nick's heart turned over in his chest."Author: Josh Lanyon

28. "JUAN PABLO MONTOYA Formula 1, and NASCAR Race Car Driver on DANGEROUS ODDS by Marisa Lankester:Reading Dangerous Odds only leads me to confirm the need people have for adrena-line. As a racecar driver, it's always about being on the edge and that is what I experienced throughout the pages of Dangerous Odds. Every chapter seemed like a race; trying to determine the odds, the risks worth taking - choosing friends and discovering enemies... It drove me to expect the unexpected. Knowing it's a true story gives us the reality check we all need from time to time. A must read book!!!"Author: Juan Pablo Montoya

29. "Every time we proceed to explain some conjectural law or theory by a new conjectural theory of a higher degree of universality, we are discovering more about the world, trying to penetrate deeper into its secrets. And every time we succeed in falsifying a theory of this kind, we make an important new discovery. For these falsifications are most important. They teach us the unexpected; and they reassure us that, although our theories are made by ourselves, although they are our own inventions, they are none the less genuine assertions about the world; for they can clash with something we never made."Author: Karl Popper

30. "True love can blossom in unexpected places. This is Jaden pretending not to notice."Author: Katie Klein

31. "She thinks petting me is an honor. This is an unexpected position to take for a goddess of slaughter, but I applaud her defiance of convention."Author: Kevin Hearne

32. "The poet must always, in every instance, have the vibrant word... that by it's trenchancy can so wound my soul that it whimpers.... One must know and recognize not merely the direct but the secret power of the word; one must be able to give one's writing unexpected effects. It must have a hectic, anguished vehemence, so that it rushes past like a gust of air, and it must have a latent, roistering tenderness so that it creeps and steals one's mind; it must be able to ring out like a sea-shanty in a tremendous hour, in the time of the tempest, and it must be able to sigh like one who, in tearful mood, sobs in his inmost heart."Author: Knut Hamsun

33. "Dropped two classes before school even started. It was actually Mom's idea. I had a novel to write. When she read the outline I developed during our move, she said school could wait, the book couldn't. An unexpected statement from her, but she had her own sixth sense. Mine told me if people were unusually good or bad, as if I picked up on a brainwave revealing their overall intentions. Mom could feel truths—and she was never wrong. She felt the truth my book would be published. She even said, mysteriously, it needed to be written. On the first day of college, with several hours between my morning classes and my one night class, I took the opportunity to do some research and planted my butt in a hard plastic"Author: Kristie Cook

34. "Don't you agree? Swordplay is a dance of sorts, an understanding of the logical, most sophisticated next step. Except that in a fight, one must take the unexpected step. In dance it is all about taking the right, expected step."Author: Lisa Tawn Bergren

35. "Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain, hope played like a playing card upon another hope, a wish for kindnesses and mercies to emerge like kings and queens in an unexpected change of the game. One could hold the cards oneself or not: they would land the same regardless."Author: Lorrie Moore

36. "After a childhood of hungering to be an adult, my hunger had passed. Unexpected fates had begun to catch my notice. These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep."Author: Lorrie Moore

37. "His mouth came down on hers hard and hot and deliberate. His kiss was so unexpected that Freddy went limp in his arms with shock. She didn't fight or protest, couldn't move or breathe. No one had ever kissed her like this, selfishly, unemotionally, taking with no thought of giving. This kiss was hungry, domineering, something that seared and scorched physically and left her mind reeling."Author: Maggie Osborne

38. "Love You asked if love makes one happy. His promise's yes, be it for a day. Ah, who wouldn't want to live one day for love Then die? For life does live in love. As lover full of gentleness and fear, With his fires I painted his suffering, On his portrait I shed so many tears That his image became much less charming. If smile, that unexpected gleam, Broke out sometimes amidst my tears, It was love, unarmed, it was him, And heaven with him disappears. Deprived of love, the heart's icy. Yet he burns all, and poisons all. He sure knows how to rend a soul. Ask him if he makes one happy! You'll know, whatever may occur, That love will win by force or grace; And in the slow-healing fever he made You will suffer and make others suffer. Once found, his absence is torture, And when he's back, one shakes every hour. Often it's death that lives in love. And yet, love does make one happy."Author: Marceline Desbordes Valmore

39. "We have to pay close attention to what we see, and be ready to work with the unexpected according to the basic principles of systems biology and medicine."Author: Mark E. Hyman

40. "If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don't hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happened better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that's often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don't be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb. (Don't Hesitate)"Author: Mary Oliver

41. "Only occasionally can you glimpse through the embrasures of an otherwise perfectly polite person to see the cannons aimed out, only in a certain glint of light do the eyeteeth become fangs. We are driven by desire and fear. Only in our solitary hungers do we find ourselves capable of the most magnificently unexpected sins."Author: Michael Paterniti

42. "When a man has a relationship with a woman, he also has to have relationship with her family, job, fears, tears, flaws, choices and other unexpected things."Author: Nina Ardianti

43. "It isn't the happy ending Ingrid and I had dreamed up, but it's all a part of what I'm working through. The way life changes. The way people and things disappear. Then appear, unexpectedly, and hold you close."Author: Nina LaCour

44. "Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens."Author: Norton Juster

45. "Don't expect too much from me, cos i might not meet up to your expectations, don't underestimate me, cos i just might do the unexpected, don't expect the truth from me always cos am human, and don't even try to judge me, cos you have not gone trough half of what av been trough"Author: Odeyale Opeyemi

46. "My strength was returning as we went on. It occurred to me then that it was in times of struggle that I found the best parts of myself-courage, loyalty, an unexpected peace- and I always discovered what I needed to break through and go on."Author: Patrick Carman

47. "Look at those vines,' he said. 'Nature is wearing her prettiest clothes.'The effect of this unexpectedly poetic observation was slight spoiled when Massot cleared his throat nosily and spat, but he was right;"Author: Peter Mayle

48. "4. Radicalism of forms. If a new model once created meets with much success on account of its greater efficiency than its predecessor, it lends certain neighbouring forms a formal radicalism, which attempts to borrow from the appearance of the new form: for example, bronze tools that had reached the furthest development of their utility had a disastrous influence on stone tools, warping them toward an elegance that could only be attained in bronze. Today aviation has imposed its aerodynamic forms even on baby strollers and irons. This radicalism of forms is a result of the fact that people become bored when they do not find some unexpected element in the familiar. This radicalism might seem illogical, as the advocates of standardization believe, but we must not forget that discovery is only made possible by this need of humanity."Author: Tom McDonough

49. "In his essay,Agastya had said that his real ambition was to be a domesticated male stray dog because they lived the best life.They were assured of food,and because they were stray they didn't have to guard a house or beg or shake paws or fetch trifles or be clean or anything similarly meaningless to earn their food.They were servile and sycophantic when hungry;once fed,and before sleep,they wagged their tails perfunctorily whenever their hosts passes,as an investment for future meals.A stray dog was free,he slept a lot,barked unexpectedly and only when he wanted to,and got a lot of sex."Author: Upamanyu Chatterjee

50. "I have read that there are two fears that cannot be trained out of us: the startle reaction upon hearing an unexpected noise, and vertigo. I would like to add a third, to wit, the rapid and direct approch of a known killer"Author: Yann Martel